Reading Room Notes

This month's post is a guest post for Girton College's "Glimpses of Girton" blog. It concerns one of the College's former students (and later Director of Studies in Archaeology, Anthropology and Classics) Norah Jolliffe. I came across her in relation to a now defunct "Romano-British Museum" at the University of Reading – Jolliffe had been its curator between 1927 and 1934, while she was Lecturer in Classics at the University. Luckily her papers are preserved at Girton College, and I visited earlier this year to have a look.

This month's post is over on "Beckett, Books and Biscuits", the blog for Special Collections at the University of Reading. I've been spending some time diving into a wonderful archive held there, the papers of Adam & Charles Black, publishers. A. & C. Black (for short) published both fiction and non-fiction, but I'm particularly interested in their non-fiction publishing efforts. Among this group can be counted a number of popular archaeology books written by Rev. James Baikie, and illustrated by his wife Constance Newman (Turner-Smith) Baikie.

I've written about one of Baikie's books – Wonder Tales of the Ancient World – here already. But this new research has helped contextualise both Baikies' work significantly. Although he wasn't an archaeologist, as I noted in Archaeologists in PrintJames Baikie was a prolific author of popular archaeology books – a pre-WW2 Leonard Cottrell – or, to use a more contemporary example, Tony Robinson. Constance Baikie, an unsung illustrator today, produced in my opinion brilliant work complementing and visually enhancing her husband's text. This took not just skill, but genius. I'm happy to say that A. & C. Black recognised her impact, crediting and paying her accordingly.

There's a lot more to the A. & C. Black collection than just information on James and Constance Baikie. It's full of authors and illustrators whose work is today almost totally unknown, but there are also more famous names, as you'll see. The Indexes to the "Letters Out" books – my main source for the post – are fascinating. I found myself wondering about the lives of those listed. Hopefully, more of them will be revealed.

You can read "Recovering Publishing Histories: The Adam and Charles Black Letterbooks" here.

The beginning of this month was entirely taken up with preparations for a workshop held in the Museum of English Rural Life and the Ure Museum. "Collectors, Curators, and Cataloguers: Hidden Women in Archaeology in the 19th and 20th centuries" was held on 12 June. Along with it we opened a new temporary display, "Hidden in the Ure Archive: Collectors, Curators and Cataloguers", which will be up until the end of July.

This month's post is on Ure Routes again. Part of my Role as Research Officer at the Ure Museum has been to start digging into the Museum's history. Annie Ure's fascinating lecture (recorded in the 1960s) and University College Reading's Annual Reports have given me insights into some of the early displays of archaeological material at Reading.

A few weeks ago I had a great tour of Reading's old campus at London Road; my guides, current and former University staff, took me to many places of interest but chief among them were "The Acasias", Portland Place and the old University Gymnasium. Each location is associated with the Ure Museum's history.

The front door of "The Acasias", part of the University of Reading's London Road campus. Photo: A. Thornton, 2019.

​Of equal relevance to the Ure's history is the fact that during the 1912/13 session George Palmer's son George William Palmer donated a series of casts of ancient Egyptian stelae to the college. One of these is now on display in the Museum; another hangs on the wall of the Classics Department.

One of George William Palmer's Deir-el-Bahri casts, hanging on a wall near the Classics Department corridor. Image: A. Thornton, 2019.

During the First World War, local Reading resident Gertrude Louisa (Hill) Hurry donated an Etruscan artefact to University College Reading, also now held and displayed in the Ure Museum. A few years earlier Gertrude Hurry and her husband Jamieson, a physician and the College's Medical Officer, donated money for the construction of a purpose-built Gymnasium. My guides pointed out the carving of Discobolus (pictured here, in searing sunlight) incorporated into the Gymnasium wall.

The Gymnasium, London Road. Image: A. Thornton, 2019.

​By 1919, University College Reading's archaeological collections were gathered together more formally in a museum room, housed at Portland Place, an 1830s Grade II* listed building on London Road. You can read "On Museum Beginnings" here and hear Annie discussing the Museum's history here.

Ure Routes, the blog I've set up to chronicle the histories in the Ure Museum archives, has moved to a University of Reading site. This month's post is there. It's about an exciting bit of content in the Ure Museum relating to Annie Ure's experiences as a student at University College Reading during the height of the suffrage campaigns before the First World War. You can read "A Suffrage Sequence" and watch the short film here.

This month's post, in honour of Women's History Month (in the UK), I've written a guest post on the University of Reading Classics Department blog. As my research into University College Reading's Annual Reports continued, I dug deeper into the history of women in the Classics Department. My wonderful grandmother was a classicist, and I'd like to think she would've have loved this post. So this is for you, Grandma! You can read "Women and Classics at University College Reading" here.

This month's post will be over on a new blog site, Ure Routes, created as part of my new role as Research Officer at the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology at the University of Reading. In the first month I've been at Reading I've been exploring the early history of the Museum and the University, and finding unexpected connections to my own history of archaeology research. You can read "Reports from Reading" here.

By Amara Thornton​This month I launched a new website: www.petra1929.co.uk. It's a digital transcription of a unique document chronicling the first intensive excavations at Petra in 1929. This is a document I've wanted to do more with for a long time. It's held in the Institute of Archaeology, part of a larger archive of material belonging to the archaeologists Agnes Conway Horsfield and George Horsfield. They were two key members of the team excavating at and researching Petra in 1929.

I've been researching Agnes Conway and George Horsfield for many years now, but with the project (and the funding supporting it from the Council for British Research in the Levant) I was able to focus on the Petra material in a way I hadn't been able to before. In order to illuminate the Diary further (and with the indispensable help of Stuart Laidlaw in the Institute's Photography Lab) I digitised quite a few negatives in the Horsfield archive as well. About 70 of these have been captioned and incorporated into the website – either added into entries (where that made sense) or into the indexes and essays.

In putting the website together, I wanted to provide users not only with a way to access the Diary, but also to gain a deeper understanding of the time period in which it was written. So there is extra content on the site. You'll find essays exploring different aspects of this historical context, as well as indexes with further information on the people and places mentioned in the Diary. This contextual research was, for me, just as important as enabling access to the Diary.

Two issues of "Asia" from the early 1920s. Both contain articles about Transjordan. Image: A. Thornton, 2019.

​So, for example, over the course of the research I learned more about what happened in Petra during the First World War. Not only was a German-Turkish archaeological unit based there, but (unsurprisingly) those who lived in and around Petra took part in wartime activity. As it happened, over the recent holidays I received a relevant present (ok I picked it out myself): a 1920 issue of Asia: The American Magazine on the Orient containing an article by American journalist Lowell Thomas on Thomas Edward Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia", who was based in and around Petra while participating in the Arab Revolt.

I was all prepared for a bit of T. E. Lawrence celebrity creation in this article, but what I wasn't prepared for was a photograph of one of the Bedouin women who lived at Petra, and a reference to her and other Bedouin women's participation in the "Battle of Petra" in October 1917.* Just a coincidence, but another illustration of the value of old ephemera (despite its incredibly colonial tone).

Do you know about Tausret? She was a queen in ancient Egypt. 19th dynasty to be precise. Until a few months ago I'd never heard of her, but now I know more – thanks to a rather intriguing book: Janet Buttles' The Queens of Egypt.*

Buttles was an American writer who was associated with American industrialist and archaeology funder/excavator Theodore Davis. Her biographical details are online courtesy of the Emma B. Andrews Diary project– a fascinating digital diary and data resource revealing early 20th century Egypt through the eyes of Emma Andrews, an educated American tourist and collector. Andrews was Buttles' aunt as well as Theodore Davis's collaborator and mistress for many years.

Queens was Buttles's attempt to do something innovative in the field of Egyptology. She pulled together in one volume all the details that were known at that time about ancient Egyptian royal women. And in doing so she articulated one of the main (and continuing) problems with making historical women more visible – missing or inaccessible historical records. In her Preface she stated:

​So many of the royal women who shared the throne of the Pharaohs have left no traces on the land of their inheritance, that this attempt to tell their story results at best in only a brief outline of the prominent figures…"

Gaston Maspero, a former head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, wrote an introduction to Queens. He mentions the value of Buttles's personal experience with the archaeology of Egypt in making her sympathetic to her subjects.

The book is organised chronologically, from the 1st to 26th dynasty (omitting the Ptolomaic period, which included the reign of Cleopatra VII). Despite the sketchy details available, Buttles's description of Twosret's life is intriguingly dramatic:

​This heiress of the kingdom claimed the crown of the Pharaohs as her birthright… a dominating princess who claims the right to active government; an elder brother who wrenches the sceptre from her grasp; his speedy exit by fair means or foul; the queen's restoration, and a joint rule with a second brother lasting only a few years, when they are both superseded by a fourth claimant."

​Archibald Constable & Co published Queens in 1908, at a period when suffrage campaigns were beginning to turn towards greater militancy. And it was reviewed in a suffrage periodical, Women's Franchise. The review opens with the observation that Buttles's work was "A valuable addition to the knowledge of the position of women in antiquity".

Now I know about it, I'll be dipping into Buttles's book to discover more ancient historical women in influential roles. You should too!

*There are many alternative spellings for Tausret's name. Between 2004 and 2016 the University of Arizona ran an excavation project at Tausret's temple in Thebes. More information and up-to-date analysis can be found here and here.

When my grandparents retired, they started taking classes for fun. One of these classes was in memoir writing, so when I was growing up we'd receive a letter every so often with a short memoir-essay enclosed. I read them at the time, but didn't consider them anything more than entertaining anecdotes. But now, with my historian's hat on, I see that they are really valuable insights into 20th century experience, and I thank my lucky stars that my grandparents made the effort to write those memories down.

A few years ago I found a binder full of copies of these short memoirs, which my grandmother had kept along with other family papers. I've now informally digitised it all, so that I can take these little snippets of family history with me wherever I go. One of my favourites was written by my grandfather, in which he remembered (among other things) how much he loved reading "penny dreadfuls" as a child, and how they instilled in him a love of history. My great-grandmother disapproved of such books and eventually threw them away. In doing so, my grandfather reasoned, she had gotten rid of what could have been quite a valuable collection.

I'd like to think that I inherited something of my grandfather's appreciation for pulp. I managed to incorporate a bit of discussion of archaeological pulp (via Margery Lawrence's contributions to Hutchinson's Mystery Stories magazine) in Archaeologists in Print. But I'm always on the lookout, so I was very pleased when I spotted at a recent pulp-focused bookfair in London Pauline Stewart's* Delia's Quest for the Golden Keys, "A Thrilling Desert Adventure Story", on a table. It is No 549 of "The Schoolgirls' Own Library", priced at 4d (it cost me £3). Its bright yellow paper cover features a girl dressed in ancient Egyptian garments with a tall headpiece standing on some sort of platform being pushed towards a temple (half submerged in water, so I'm assuming Philae) by a chap looking remarkably like a swimming 1930s filmstar. It's dated 6 August 1936.

Happily, "The Schoolgirls Own Library" is a series I've come across before, while I was writing Archaeologists in Print and looking for information on pulp serials. There are a number of websites out there for collectors and readers of such books, and Friardale is one of them. It's excellent, and has loads of resources available in pdf form. There is also a list of titles in "The Schoolgirls Own Library" (and affiliated publications), so you can get a sense of the adventures those schoolgirls get up to.

A proportion of them have vague connections to places that were for most British readers 'exotic'. So, alongside Delia and her Golden Keys, we have No 688, Hilda Richards'** "Babs & Co in Egypt" (how I wish that one were available!) which has on its bright yellow cover a gaggle of teenage schoolgirls pointing a flashlight at a rather shocked-looking mummy standing at the entrance to an ancient Egyptian tomb.

You can find a list of "Schoolgirls Own Library" titles here. I haven't yet gotten more than a few pages into Delia's Quest, but I'm intrigued to see whether any archaeologist characters crop up in it. Based on the cover, I'm hoping so. At the very least, it'll be an insight into how Egypt (and British tourists' relationship to Egypt) is portrayed in this kind of work. Maybe that portrayal will surprise me. But I'm not getting my hopes up too much.